With high job demand and high paying salaries, programming is one of the most attractive careers to explore these days. Within the field, though, there's a good variation between pay.

Compass took data from multiple sources over the last year—a survey of startup executivies and software engineers, Elance-oDesk and Toptal freelancer portals, and public data from Glassdoor, Angellist, and Payscale—to compare how software engineers and developers get paid (US companies only).

The data differs slightly from the results from a study published by Quartz from the Brookings Institution, but it contains more datapoints. Besides comparing the salary value of learning one language over another, the infographic also compares job roles (e.g., backend developers tend to earn more than frontend developers) and company types (e.g., startups pay 13 percent more than traditional IT firms).